I'd said the most powerful thing I could do at the vote was not attend it, and I was right, and I went anyway.
I went because there is a difference between strategy and love, and I had spent a whole year learning to tell them apart, and I was not going to let my father stand up in a room full of his enemies and kill his own god alone. Some things you show up for even when showing up costs you the cleaner story. So I let it cost me. I went up into the glass world I'd sworn not to fight in, and I did not go to the floor, and I did not say a word — I stood at the very back, one more body in a plain coat, close enough to see his face when he did the thing I'd asked him to do.
The Council chamber was full. All twelve Houses, and the galleries above them packed with everyone who could bribe or beg their way in, because the whole drowned world knew what today was: the day the free city got a king again, and thanked him for it.
And on a low chair near the front, not on the floor, never on the floor, sat a slight man with a scholar's stoop and kind eyes, watching his year of work come due. Lucian had come to see it crowned. Of course he had. He always came to where the important thing was.
Alaric held them honest.
...
